Nothing worth seeing, or hearing, about ‘the Morgans’

December 17, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

By ROGER MOORE

Orlando Sentinel

Sandra Bullock hitched her career to writer, and later writer-director, Marc Lawrence when he scripted “Forces of Nature.” She stayed with him through the “Miss Congeniality” hits and up to “Two Weeks Notice” (2002). Then Bullock weaned herself from Lawrence’s brand of gimmicky, wan and witless comedies and lived to stage a comeback this year.

But Bullock passed Lawrence on, like a bad penny, to Hugh Grant, her co-star in “Two Weeks Notice.” And Grant can’t seem to kick the Lawrence habit.

“Did You Hear About the Morgans?,” Grant’s third film with Lawrence, may be his overdue intervention. Unfunny and tone-deaf, it pairs Grant with Sarah Jessica Parker, with whom he has no chemistry, and gives neither of them anything funny to say or play.

She’s a star of the New York real-estate market. He’s a rich attorney. They have assistants (Elisabeth Moss and Jesse Liebman) who hate each other, too. They’re separated. He’s trying to get her back. But he cheated, and she’s not having him.

Darned if his one shot at a reconciliation dinner doesn’t end with a murder that they witness. Since the killer is on the loose, the Feds ship them off — “Witness Relocation Program” slickers hiding amongst the Red-State rubes of Ray, Wyoming. The first people they meet are the law- enforcement couple who will be their hosts, played by a twinkly Sam Elliott and a pistol-packing Mary Steenburgen.

“Oh my God, it’s Sarah Palin!”

Most of the movie is made up of pained conversations over trust between two people who don’t click, on any level. In between heart-to-hearts, they make tired observations about life outside of Manhattan.

“I can’t breathe,” Meryl wheezes. “The air’s too clean!”

The only moments that have a prayer of clicking in this fish-out-of-water comedy concern the few good actors cast in Wyoming supporting roles — grizzled Elliott, common-sense Steenburgen and Wilford Brimley, a local grandpa grump, a true Westerner and hater of big-city Democrats.

Lawrence’s recycled observations of the virtues of rural life, his struggles to find something funny about local “types” (an unworldly doctor and his naive-nitwit nurse), his “grizzly encounter” scene, are painful to watch. The way this witless “Witness” works is that the hit-man tracks them down to Wymoning, but Lawrence fails to find humor or menace in that. His ineptitude extends to knowing when to end this too- predictable fiasco.

But with luck, Grant, whose options on the romantic-comedy front have narrowed, will finally snap out of it after this. The best thing that could happen to Hugh is if nobody hears about the “Morgans.”